Technicians, Mandarins, and Witnesses: Searching for Professional Understanding

Abstract

There is no greater professional identity crisis than that which has befallen educators presiding over and teaching in schools, departments, and colleges of education.Uneasiness is reflected in the almost endless discussions of the meaning of professionalism in education. It is reflected in unceasing dialogue about what ought to be taught and/or required of professional educators. It is reflected in a multiplicity of reorganization schemes that seek, through systematic re-scrambling of faculty and programs, to infuse new purpose and dimension into the curriculum. Like most identity crises, the one overtaking schools of education is as pregnant with possibilities as it is marked with pitfalls. What follows is a biased argument: that those who study the Foundations of Education are, of all education scholars, the most likely ones to identify the possibilities and illuminate the pitfalls awaiting professional educators. It is not meant to be a celebration of Foundations, but a reminder of what we as educators might aspire to, imagine, reconstruct, and recreate in our effort to preserve and enhance the possibilities of deliberate education.The barrage of criticism issuing from universities and from government agencies and agents, political activists, enraged parents, and disinterested young people all reflect disillusion. It is disillusion with the capacity of teachers to enhance the ability of students to express themselves communally and individually, to sustain moral commitments, to harmonize tradition, to create new expressive modes, and to engage the world competently and critically. It is disillusion with the intellectual, moral, and technical capacities of professional teacher educators as well. demographic transformations. It might even be incorrect or inappropriate. Whatever its sources, whatever its inspiration, the barrage of criticism compels a response.In an atmosphere of challenge, perplexity, and moral and intellectual crisis, we have available to us at least three different sorts of responses. Two of them are traditional.The third is novel. Each of the responses proceeds from different assumptions about the meaning, purpose, and uses of professional education. Each reflects different traditions of discourse, distinct visions of professionalIn an atmosphere of challenge, perplexity, and moral and intellectual crisis, we have available to us at least three different sorts of responses. Two of them are traditional. The third is novel.community and culture. First, there is a technicist response, involving teacher educators in a kind of strategic retreat into scientism and into a community dotted with machines, laboratories, and computers.Second, there is a Mandarin response, involving an attempt to attach teacher educators closely to traditional centers of learning in the universities among books and inspirational prose. Finally, there is a mediator's response, representing neither a retreat into split-level houses of intellect, nor a withdrawal into labs and clinics, but into shifting communities compris...

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